The Empire, using corrupted R2 units, has hijacked a trio of X-Wings and my squadron’s been sent to disable them so we the pilots can be rescued and their flight data can be kept out of enemy hands. Disabling them winds up being easy; the ion cannons on our Y-Wings leave them helpless and ripe for recapture. Unfortunately, we’re not alone. An Imperial Star Destroyer is already in the area and doesn’t take kindly to our snatching its prize away.

The Destroyer launches a squadron of Tie Interceptors to attack us. Our shuttles, in turn, arrive to retake the X-Wings, but they’ll need more time than the Ties are going to give them. Setting my shields to double front, I turn to take them on. The Ties came right at me and for a moment it’s just me charging headlong into an oncoming torent of green lasers, praying my deflectors will hold. I take down one fighter with a proton torpedo, followed quickly by a second and third. It’s only when the fourth comes into range that my shields finally give away.

I veer out of its path, but it’s too late. A laser tears through my armor, knocking out my torpedo launcher. Undaunted, I turn around to give chase, firing at the Tie with my laser cannons. He isn’t interested in me anymore, though. The shuttles I’ve been fighting to protect are a much more appealing target. He speeds toward and I follow, rerouting power from my shields into my engines. Even with this boost however, his Interceptor is leagues faster than my sluggish Y-Wing. For every inch I gain he seems to moves ahead two more.

It’s at this point that things take a turn for the worse. The Star Destroyer launches a second squadron of Ties. They quickly overtake me and, while I turn to fight them, it’s a lopsided battle from the start. They fly circles around my damaged fighter, using their speed to stay out of my crosshairs and their numbers to keep me off-balance. I hold on for final few paltry moments until, finally, my Y-Wing explodes unceremoniously into a cloud of debris, leaving the shuttles defenseless and my mission a failure.
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Freshly defeated, I sit for a moment staring at my computer screen. I’ve spent the better part of two hours trying to beat this mission and every fiber of my being wants to try again. As I gear up for another attempt however, my eyes drift to the clock glowing faintly on the other side of my darkened bedroom. It reads 1:07. I want to beat this sucker, but I have to work tomorrow and I know that I’m already pushing my limits. With a sigh, I click out of Star Wars: X-Wing, brush my teeth and lay down next to my wife to go to sleep.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a late night with this game. It’s funny because I hadn’t expected to be this enthralled with it. After all, I’d already played more than a few space flight sims in my time and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron had long ago done the job of letting me explore my childhood dreams of being an X-Wing pilot. I wouldn’t say I approached X-Wing with a negative attitude, but I honesty wasn’t sure what else it could offer me that other games hadn’t already delivered. So of course it would wind up being one of the most addictive damn games I’ve ever played.

As you hopefully have figured out, the game puts you in the shoes of a starfighter pilot fighting with the Rebel Alliance against the Galactic Empire. The story opens in the period just prior to the events of A New Hope and begins with the Empire launching a new campaign to root out and destroy the Rebel Alliance.

I’ll say that the story itself wasn’t all that engaging. That said, this isn’t Wing Commander where the game’s almost more interested in delivering a gripping space opera than it is with its actual gameplay. Rather, the plot in X-Wing is used more for providing context and direction for your various flight missions. And while, in the past, I’ve often been a ceaseless proponent for games having strong stories, I have to admit that the way X-Wing employs its narrative is downright masterful. You don’t just patrol nav point after identical nav point in X-Wing. Whether you’re attacking a Star Destroyer or defending a medical convoy, the missions are designed to match and reflect the story as it unfolds.

The game also does a fantastic job of making these missions feel unique even when they’re cut from the same basic cloth. In its earliest stages, for instance, you’ll play through a lot of levels that could be summed up as “hold off the Empire until (insert ship) can (insert objective).” Despite these similarities, however, I never felt like I was playing repetitively.

Much of this variety comes from X-Wing’s implementation of its different fighter types. Throughout your time with it, you’ll be given access to four ships: the X-Wing, Y-Wing, A-Wing and B-Wing. And, while they obviously share identical control schemes, each fighter feels and flies like its own, wholly unique war machine. The A-Wing is fast and maneuverable, but has paper thin shields and a weak weapons array. The Y-Wing, comparatively, comes packaged with a ton of guns and strong defenses, but is about as nimble as a beached whale. The dogfight I described in this review’s opening? The one t that I so embarrassingly lost? If I’d been piloting an A-Wing, it probably would have been a piece of cake. That said, the objectives of the level demanded the use of the Y-Wing and the rest of it was clearly tailored toward exploiting its weaknesses and challenging the player to overcome them. Simply put, while the game might recycle mission types at times, it does so in a way that makes good use of them.

This isn’t to say the mission design is perfect. As much as I enjoyed most of them, there were definitely a few levels that crossed the border into unnecessary frustration. Moreover, even with the more manageable stages, there’s often a strong element of trial and error to victory. Winning can require little more than just learning where and when your enemies spawn and using that to counter them in advance. This didn’t bother me too much. Having to replay certain sections over and over again when I failed wasn’t something that made me happy, but I also never felt frustrated enough for it to be a deal breaker. That said, I could definitely see it being an issue for some players who would rather win based on sheer skill as opposed to practice.

I also found the controls to be a tad convoluted, initially. Granted, they’re like that because you’re given a lot of different commands that you can use during the combat. Throttle controls, energy management controls, weapon options, wingman orders; the game does a lot to make sure that the keyboard is put to thorough use. It can just take a bit of work to learn how to use them all. GOG does provide a reference PDF that lists off what everything does, but it’s not always easy to consult when you’re caught up in the heat of the moment trying to dodge some bastard Tie Fighter that’s locked on your tail. All of this said, the learning process shouldn’t take most average gamers too long and once you get things down it should just come as second nature.

You just really want to be sure you’re playing the game with a flight stick. I’m a remarkably cheap person most of the time and so, when playing flight sims, I’ve generally just used the mouse and keyboard options rather than springing for a joystick. Unfortunately, they’re kind of rubbish in X-Wing and by the third or fourth missions I got so tired of dying due to inadequate controls that I finally broke down and rush ordered a flight stick from Amazon. My experience after plugging it in couldn’t have been more night and day. My maneuvering became smoother, my laser fire more accurate and, most importantly, the game itself became a hell of a lot of more fun.

Which brings us to X-Wing’s presentation. I suppose you could criticize its aging visuals, but those were never personally an issue for me. When I was in combat, I was too involved in trying not to die to care about whether or not the Star Destroyers were hyper detailed. I also just like pixel art too much to say anything bad about the graphics in-between missions. Not to mention that if the visuals really bother you, you can just play the updated 1998 edition that comes packaged with the GOG re-release. The same advice could be given if you dislike the 1993 edition’s MIDI music, something I could sympathize with a bit more. It’s not the worst I’ve ever heard, but it still gets pretty repetitious after awhile and I eventually had to turn it down.

In the end, these problems has pale in comparison to what X-Wing accomplishes. I’ve played plenty of Star Wars games in my life and X-Wing is probably one of the authentic feeling ones I’ve ever experienced. The sights, the sounds, the action; when I was a kid rewinding the Battle of Yavin over and over again, this is much what I thought it would be like. The game is just well made and, while some elements are obviously a bit elderly at this point, the overall package has stood the test of time better than most any other game I’ve reviewed for this column. To repeat that most overused Star Wars cliché: the Force is strong with this one. Pick it up at GOG if you haven’t already.

UPDATE: GOG.com now has a timer atop its home page that reads “NEW GAMING PUBLISHER COMING IN.” This timer is set to expire at 10 AM EDT / 7 AM PDT today, Oct. 28.

GOG will be adding X-Wing, Tie Fighter and a slew of other LucasArts classics in an update tomorrow.

The re-release plans were revealed today by members of the GOG community who discovered official release announcements posted prematurely by the company in its own forums. The forum threads containing these announcements have since been deleted but not before it was confirmed that digital retailer would adding X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam & Max Hit the Road to its library.

As GOG itself currently hasn’t released an official announcement for its new LucasArts library, we can’t confirm any sort of pricing information. That being the case, if the new games follow the example of the rest of its catalog, we can likely expect the older titles to be $5.99 with newer games like Knights of the Old Republic to cost $9.99.

LucasFilm announced last month not only that the continuity of the Star Wars Expanded Universe is now at the mercy of the films and TV shows its producing, but that wide swaths of the Star Wars canon as we know it is already being disgarded.

So far, LucasFilm has only specified that Expanded Universe tales taking place after Return of the Jedi are out, but there’s really no way of knowing right now what else will get dumped.

Though the Jedi Knight series is the only group of games that take place after the original film trilogy, there nonetheless is much gnashing of teeth by fans over what the New Star Wars Canon means for the games, collectively. I don’t have any answers about whether Knights of the Old Republic’s Revan or Dark Forces’ Kyle Katarn still exist in Star Wars, and that’s okay for now. But in the meantime, let’s take a look back at some of the coolest, and most uncool, moments we’ve experienced in the Star Wars video game canon as it existed before all this drama.

Cool: Fixing the Ebon Hawk in Knights of the Old Republic 2

Next to the openings of most Star Wars games, the tutorial prologue for KOTOR 2 is rather mundane, and that’s specifically why I like it. You begin on the Ebon Hawk, which was your ship on the first KOTOR, and you control T3, an astromech droid companion from that game, but the circumstances are strange. The only people aboard the Hawk are an old, dead womanm and an unconscious Jedi Exile. The Hawk itself is all messed up, with a busted engine and a gaping hole in the cargo bay. And T3 has to fix it up enough to make it to a nearby asteroid mining outpost, or everybody dies.

And that’s all there is. You roll around the ship grabbing scrap that you can repurpose for repairs. It’s not a grand, exciting quest, and you don’t even really know what’s going on. And yet this is Star Wars at its finest. Being such a thoroughly established universe, you can tell whatever kind of story you want in Star Wars because we pretty much already get it. The meat, as it were, is already there, and so not every tale has to be a world-saving one. Though KOTOR 2 does eventually become that, its street-level beginnings create a sort of awesome blue collar feel that we rarely get in popular science fiction.

Even so, apparently all but Rebel Assault’s version of the Battle of Yavin from Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope were considered part of the continuity, and that being the case, it means the Rebels had a base on Hoth before they had a base on Hoth. In Rebel Assault, RookieOne takes part in the defense of Gamma Base on ice planet Hoth by flying a snowspeeder and taking down AT-AT walkers with a tow cable, all before the Battle of Yavin — the assault on the original Death Star. Meaning three years before Darth Vader and the Empire had no idea the main Rebel base (Echo Base) was on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader and the Empire attacked a Rebel base (Gamma Base) on Hoth.

Outstanding.

Cool: Joining the Secret Order of the Emperor in TIE Fighter

TIE Fighter had its own cool blue collar thing going, putting you in the role of an Imperial pilot of a flimsy TIE Fighter on what amounts to peacekeeping missions. You are, more or less, the Space Police.

As you go about your business, though, you can discover secret objectives during missions that, should you complete them, will draw the attention of the Emperor himself.

Over the course of the game you’ll see that completing these secret objectives, often given to you by a shadowy figure after the regular mission briefings, will allow you to work your way up through the Secret Order, with each rank granting you a new, cool purple forearm tattoo. What this all meant, essentially, is that in addition to being regular Space Police you were also Space Secret Police, adding a really interesting level of cool to what already was a totally cool story.

Uncool: Mara Jade training under Kyle Katarn

As Jimmy Valmer of “South Park” would say, “I mean, come on.” I know everybody loves protagonist Kyle Katarn and the Jedi Knight games he inhabits, but those games basically acted as if they existed in their own universe most of the time. Kyle flippin’ Katarn taking Mara Jade — the most well known character from the Expanded Universe, and eventual wife of Luke Skywalker — as his Jedi apprentice in the Mysteries of the Sith expansion is one of the more egregious examples. Mara Jade is a beloved Expanded Universe character who gets dumped into a situation that makes little contextual sense, and is never, ever referenced elsewhere. Because Jedi Knight.

In the Jedi Knight sub-universe, Katarn is basically the King Jedi, taking down a cabal of weird Sith that roll around in a Super Star Destroyer, and then apparently having the sort of clout that would lead Mara Jade to be his underling. Mysteries of the Sith, by the way, takes place between the two key Expanded Universe book arc in the post-Return of the Jedi story: the Thrawn Trilogy and the Jedi Academy Trilogy. That makes Katarn Mara’s first in-earnest Jedi instructor, which is never mentioned again when she starts training with Luke. I mean come on.

For a comparable analogy, imagine there was a video game between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones that has Anakin Skywalker learning a bunch of key, influential stuff from a random Jedi like Kit Fisto. And then it never ever comes up again — but it’s still considered part of the canon.

Mysteries of the Sith doesn’t even tell a bad story, but the Mara Jade moment is a big bit of dumb fan service.

The year of our Lord, ninteteen hundred and eighty. Not only did it bring us Pac-Man in the arcade, it also delivered Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back in the theaters. My grandfather took me to see it, and holeeeee sheeeet. Empire. I remember walking out of the theater, unable to stop my mouth from moving: Darth Vader is Luke’s father? He’s gotta be lying! I can’t believe Han is frozen in carbonite! Did you see those Imperial Walkers? I wanna live in Cloud City! Luke has a robot hand now, does that mean he’s turning into Vader? How long until the next Star Wars?

When I finally had to stop talking so I could breathe, I looked up at grandpa Sharkey, the tough-as-nails Korean War veteran, and saw a huge smile on his lined face. He hadn’t been to the movies in years, he would tell me on the ride home, and he had no idea what film makers could accomplish with special effects. “Incredible,” is the word he kept using to describe it. “Incredible.” Pretty telling when a 50 year old and a six year old walk out of a movie together and are both equally astonished.

A few years later, my love of games and all things Rebel Alliance was captured perfectly by Atari’s sit-down arcade dream, Star Wars. The vector graphics were dull, but being in the pilot seat of an X-Wing and going on the Trench Run, Obi-Wan telling me to, “Use the force,” was mind-blowing. Atari: congrats on earning my entire allowance for the year in 1983, one quarter at a time.

Gaming and Star Wars have danced together dozens of times since then with a few highs (the Super Star Wars series on the SNES, the Dark Forces series, Battlefront, and Knights of the Old Republic), but none truly captured the magic for me like the Star Wars: X-Wing franchise. It was the Star Wars arcade experience only with gorgeous graphics instead of green lines and complete pilot control instead of on-rails shooting. The first X-Wing was released when I was in college, and I gladly missed many a class to join the Rebel Alliance and do my duty against the Empire. The trend continued when, a year later, I joined the dark side for Star Wars: TIE Fighter.

Today, we’re at 13 years and counting since the last X-Wing (Alliance) shipped, and while I’ve really enjoyed a handful of Star Wars games in the interim, nothing has come close. Nothing with the official Star Wars label on it, that is. But when a dev at CCP Games placed the Oculus Rift on my head for the EVE-VR (EVR for short) demo at E3, he might as well have been handing me a Star Wars Rebel pilot helmet.

This was my first time using Oculus Rift, and I was instantly immersed. My fighter ship’s glowing cockpit instruments were laid out all around me, close enough to reach out and touch. Looking left and right, I saw the massive ships of my fleet. Best of all, when I looked down, I saw a gorgeously detailed sci-fi fighter pilot jump suit in place of my body.